The Duke's Suspicion. Susanna Craig
her mere presence would have sufficed to forge a path through the room.
On the bench closest to the window sat a man with greasy dark hair. If the sight of him thumbing idly through the pages of her journal had not blanketed her vision in a red haze of anger, she might also have noticed his red coat. His militia uniform.
“Kindly unhand my journal.” Though she spoke quietly, she thrust out her hand, palm upward, so forcefully that the muscles of her arm quivered.
He did not rise, and a lazy smile revealed rather mossy teeth. “What have we here? An Irish rebel—?”
The words sharpened her senses, brought the moment into vivid relief.
As if observing her own actions from a great distance, she watched her hand sweep the journal from his grasp and then swing back. The sturdy leather binding—no delicate lady’s commonplace book, this—struck along his jaw, effectively wiping the grin from his face.
One of his fellow soldiers guffawed, and suddenly the noises and odors of the room rushed back to full force, threatening to overwhelm her. Her narrow pinpoint of focus expanded from his uniform, grimy from travel and frayed around the collar and cuffs, into a swath of chaos. Clutching her journal in one hand and her skirts in the other, she ran from the room.
Hitting him had been yet another mistake. She could not even say what had prompted her to do it. Her distrust of soldiers? His disdain for Ireland? Perhaps a bit of both. Oh, why could she never seem to control her temper, her impulses? Was he following?
Outside once more, she paused only to scan the inn yard for Lord Ashborough’s coaches. But the yard was empty. Perhaps around the corner? No? Well, surely that was his carriage, standing by the church…
Oh, no. Now she understood her most serious error. When she’d discovered her journal missing, she’d hopped from the baggage coach without telling Mr. Remington to wait. He must have assumed she had decided to ride the rest of the way with her sister. Erica’s absence would likely not be noticed for hours.
She was stranded.
She could almost hear Cami’s voice telling her to wait right where she was. But Erica’s hasty reaction to the soldier’s sneer had rendered this village’s only lodging less than hospitable.
Regrettably, she had a great deal of experience with crises. Most, like this, of her own making. And sitting still had never been her preferred method of coping with any of them.
She furrowed her brow, trying to recall the map in the guidebook. People came from all over Britain to visit the Lake District. There would be signposts to Windermere. Surely even she, with her notoriously poor sense of direction, could find it. With another glance at the threatening sky, she began to walk.
What was a little rain?
For the first mile or so, she watched the clouds tumble toward her, listened to the peals of thunder as they swelled and grew, seemingly born of the earth as much as the air. Mud from an earlier rain dragged at her hems and sucked at the soles of her walking boots. At the second mile, she gave up the roadway in favor of the grassy verge. Cold, thick drops began to fall, speckling her dress and face. Hardly had she managed to stuff her journal into her pelisse when the sky opened and water poured down in sheets, whipped by the wind like clothing on the line, blinding her.
Something sharp snagged at her skirts, jabbed at the chilled flesh of her thigh beneath. The hedgerow. A flash of lightning showed her a gap in its tangled branches, barely wide enough for her to pass through. And a little way beyond it, an abandoned-looking stone cottage. Would its roof provide shelter? She could not tell until she reached it.
Head down, she pushed onward. The wind snatched at her sodden bonnet. Nearly strangled by its ties at her throat, she scrabbled with numb fingers to loosen them. Once free, the bonnet whirled into the storm and was gone.
The twenty yards standing between her and her goal seemed to take almost as long to travel as the two miles she had already come. At last, its stout slab door stood before her. Here, in the shadow of the low building, the wind still lashed, but it no longer threatened to carry her away. As she leaned her head against the door to fumble with the latch, she felt a movement. Not of her own making. Not the rumble of the storm, either. The door swung inward and she collapsed onto the dirt floor at the booted feet of a stranger.
The cottage was not abandoned, after all.
Even a cursory glance told her these were not the sort of boots generally worn by cottagers, however. The supple leather was not muddy or scuffed as it would have been if the man were a laborer or had recently trudged across the open field. Perhaps he had been traveling on horseback. Or perhaps he simply had been wise enough to take shelter before the rain began.
Without speaking, he stepped around her to shut the door, muffling the storm’s noise and closing out its murky light, casting the single room into near darkness.
Oh, God. This was it—her most serious error in judgment. Ever. Erica scrambled to her feet and whirled about to face him, her rain-sodden skirts slapping against her legs. But he was already moving past her again.
“Wait there.” His voice was pitched low, audible beneath the storm.
Gradually, her eyes were able to pick out his shape, now on the far side of the small room. A narrow seam of light formed a square on the wall behind him—a window, blocked by wooden shutters. She heard a rattle, a scrape, a hiss. Flame sparked to life in his hands then became the warm, flickering glow of a candle.
“That blast of wind blew it out,” he explained with a glance past her at the door. Was it her imagination, or was there an accusatory note in his voice?
The candle lit his features from below, giving them a sardonic cast. Impossible to tell whether he was handsome or plain, dark or fair, young or…well, his voice, his ease of movement, certainly did not suggest an old man. And he was tall—taller than Papa. Than either of her brothers or her brother-in-law. Taller even than Henry…
Oh, why, in this moment, had she thought of Henry? But so it always went, her mind flitting from one idea to the next, fixing on precisely the things she ought to forget, and forgetting the things she ought to—
Her journal!
With a shudder of alarm, she slithered a hand between the wet, clinging layers of her pelisse and her somewhat drier dress and pulled the book from its hiding place. As she hurried toward the light, the man drew back a step. With the candle between her and her journal, so the stranger could see nothing but its binding, she turned the book over in her hands, then thumbed through its pages to assess the damage. The leather cover was damp; rain had wetted the edges of the paper here and there. It would look worn and wrinkled when it was dry, but so far as she could tell, the journal’s contents were miraculously unharmed. A sigh of relief eased from her.
When she laid her journal on the tabletop, the candlelight once more threw itself freely around the room. The stranger was looking her up and down, his expression both incredulous and stern. A familiar expression. Cami wore it often in Erica’s presence.
Of course she looked a mess. Who wouldn’t, under these circumstances? Icy rivulets ran from her hair down her face, and beneath the howl of the wind, she could hear the steady patter of water dripping from her skirts onto the floor. If this were a scene in one of those novels her sister denied reading, the hero would probably invite her to strip off her drenched clothing and dry herself before the fire. Something shocking would likely follow.
But there was no fire. And this man showed no intention of acting the part of a hero.
As if to confirm her thoughts, he shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “What in God’s name are you doing out in a storm like this?”
* * * *
When Major Lord Tristan Laurens asked a question, he expected an answer. He certainly did not expect the subject of his interrogation to bristle, fling a lock of wet hair over her shoulder—spraying him with rainwater, almost dousing the candle—and reply, “I might ask you the same.”
Unblinking,